My syndicated column today reports on Team Obama and the Obamedia’s mission to tear down Joe the Plumber. Yes, we are in the midst of a new contagion: Joe The Plumber Derangement Syndrome. JTPDS.

Now, pay close attention to how the MSM rushes to uncover every last bit of gossip and dirt about Joe Wurzelbacher’s life. Some of it is relevant to the public policy questions he posed to Obama. Much of it is not. Danny Glover notes the behemoth double standards of the media mavens who call it journalism when they investigate, but consider it “stalking” when those of us on the Right perform the same tasks on Democrat poster families:

“The impulse to learn more about Wurzelbacher is perfectly normal. Readers and viewers are no doubt want to know more about the man now that he is all over the news. I know I do. And speaking as a journalist, let me add that reporters should be curious enough to do some basic background research.

But why is it that political reporters only get curious when a conservative Joe America storms onto the scene? Why aren’t they just as curious when liberals trot out, say, a 12-year-old boy to give a national radio address?

It has been almost a year to the day since journalists dropped the ball on telling America more about Graeme Frost, the boy who made the case for sinking billions of dollars more into the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. But when Michelle Malkin and other curious conservative bloggers did the legwork the press wouldn’t, they earned the scorn of their mainstream colleagues.

This time around, with Joe The Plumber as their target, the MSM is coming out with guns blazing. Maybe they should spend more time telling the bigger story about Wurzelbacher — that he managed to get Obama on the public record as favoring a socialistic redistribution of wealth.

As I note below, there’s also a feeding frenzy over Wurzelbacher’s tax lien. Patterico wonders where the media hounds are on the story of Obama’s treasurer’s tax liens. Bet you hadn’t heard about that. Bet you never will again.
Here’s the NYTimes’ latest on Joe vs. Team Obama. Count how many sentences are devoted to Obama’s wealth redistribution remarks and how long it takes before they mention them.

No, they don’t get it.

***The Left declares war on Joe the Plumber
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2008

Six-term Sen. Joe Biden’s got some nerve going after citizen Joe the Plumber. But the entrenched politician from Delaware, who fancies himself the nation’s number one Ordinary Joe, had no choice. Obama-Biden simply can’t tolerate an outspoken citizen successfully painting the Democratic ticket as socialist overlords. And so a dirty, desperate war against Joe Wurzelbacher is on.

The Left’s political plumbers are attacking the messenger, rummaging through his personal life, and predictably wielding the race card once again. It’s standard operating procedure for the Obama thug machine.

Wurzelbacher, in case you’ve been in hibernation, is the small businessman from Ohio who questioned Obama this weekend about his tax plan during a Toledo campaign swing. The revealing exchange was caught on tape and broadcast widely across the Internet and TV airwaves. In response to Joe’s question about why he should be “taxed more and more for fulfilling the American dream,” Obama sermonized that Wurzelbacher needed to “spread the wealth around” because “it’s good for everybody.”

John McCain flung that chilling Marxist mantra back in Obama’s face during Wednesday night’s presidential debate and repeatedly cited Joe the Plumber’s plight. Obama squirmed. The dirt-diggers started Googling. And the next morning, six-term Sen. Biden launched the first salvo against the Ohio entrepreneur on NBC’s Today Show, challenging the veracity of his story: “I don’t have any ‘Joe the Plumbers’ in my neighborhood that make $250,000 a year.”

Under an Obama-Biden administration, they’ll make sure no Joe The Plumbers ever earn such a salary. “It’s good for everybody,” don’t you know?

Biden, as is so often the case, twisted the facts about Wurzelbacher. No surprise there. Slick Joe is the one who tells fables about visiting a diner in Delaware that hasn’t been open in years; spins yarns about getting “forced down” in a helicopter over Afghanistan because of perilous conditions that turned out to be weather-related, not al Qaeda-related; and continues to slander the family of the man involved in his wife and daughter’s fatal car accident (crash investigators cleared the now-deceased driver of drunk-driving, despite Biden’s insinuations). But I digress.

Wurzelbacher never claimed to be making $250,000 a year. He told Obama that he might be “getting ready to buy a company that makes about $250,000, $270,000” a year. His simple point was that Obama’s punitive tax proposals would make it more difficult to realize his dream.

Obama’s followers couldn’t handle the incontrovertible truth. Left-wing blogs immediately went to work, blaring headlines like “Not A Real $250k Plumber!” Next, they falsely accused Wurzelbacher of not being registered to vote (he’s registered in Lucas County, Ohio, and voted as a Republican in this year’s primary).

Next, award-winning liberal blogger Joshua Marshall cast Wurzelbacher as some kind of rabid freak for calling Social Security a “joke” – as if no working-class Americans could believe that the federal government’s entitlement programs were a rip-off unless they were bought and paid for by the McCain campaign.

Then, suddenly, the journalists who wouldn’t lift a finger to investigate Barack Obama’s longtime relationships with Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright sprang into action rifling through citizen Joe Wurzelbacher’s tax records. Politico.com reported breathlessly: “Samuel J. Wurzelbacher has a lien placed against him to the tune of $1,182.92. The lien is dated from January of ’07.” Press outlets probed his divorce records. The local plumbers’ union, which has endorsed Obama, claimed he didn’t do their required apprenticeship work and didn’t have a license to work outside his local township.

Hang him!

After Wurzelbacher told Katie Couric that Obama’s rhetorical tap dance was “almost as good as Sammy Davis, Jr.,” the inevitable cries of “bigotry” followed. (There are now tens of thousands of hits on the Internet for “Joe the Plumber racist.”)